Freedom of Expression in Bhutan

Freedom of expression in Bhutan — sometimes rendered as freedom of speech — is guaranteed in the 2008 Constitution and regulated in practice by a combination of the Penal Code of Bhutan 2004, the National Security Act 1992, the Information, Communications and Media Act 2018, and rules issued by the Bhutan InfoComm and Media Authority (BICMA). This article covers the constitutional guarantee, the statutory framework, the structure and ownership of the Bhutanese press, documented prosecutions, the question of self-censorship, the place of royal imagery in state communications, and the way international monitors describe the country.

The central tension in almost every source is the gap between text and practice. Bhutan has a constitution that protects speech, opinion, expression, information and press freedom in near-absolute language, alongside a press environment in which the government is the largest advertiser, the two biggest outlets (Kuensel and Bhutan Broadcasting Service) operate as state-owned enterprises, criminal defamation remains on the books, and the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index has moved the country from 33rd in 2022 to 152nd in 2025.^[1] Academic, advocacy and domestic sources describe that gap very differently, and this article presents each position rather than collapsing them into one.

Bhutanese domestic media, external monitors and academic researchers diverge sharply on emphasis. Where Kuensel and BBS describe a functioning free press operating within responsible-reporting norms, RSF, Human Rights Watch, the US State Department and CIVICUS describe pervasive self-censorship, structural economic dependency on the state, and a near-total absence of domestic reporting on some topics — the Lhotshampa expulsion, the political-prisoner caseload, and critical coverage of the royal family. The academic literature tends to triangulate between the two.

Constitutional framework

Article 7 of the 2008 Constitution contains the guarantees relevant to expression. Article 7(2) provides that "a Bhutanese citizen shall have the right to freedom of speech, opinion and expression." Article 7(3) provides that "a Bhutanese citizen shall have the right to information." Article 7(5) provides that "there shall be freedom of the press, radio and television and other forms of dissemination of information, including electronic." These three clauses, read together, cover the main grounds of expression — individual speech, access to information held by the state, and the media as a distinct institution.^[2]

Article 7(22) is the restrictions clause. It provides that rights under Article 7 are subject to "such reasonable restrictions" as may be imposed by law in the interests of sovereignty, security, unity and integrity of Bhutan, peace, stability and well-being of the nation; the interests of friendly relations with foreign states; public order, decency or morality; contempt of court; defamation; incitement to an offence; and the doctrine of the Tsa-Wa-Sum — the unity of King, country and people. In practice, Article 7(22) is the legal hinge on which every speech prosecution turns, because the operative statutes invoke its categories.

Bhutanese case law on Articles 7(2), 7(3) and 7(5) is thin. The Supreme Court of Bhutan has been in operation only since 2010 and the reported judgments that directly interpret the expression clauses are few. Most speech questions have been handled either under the Penal Code defamation provisions, under the National Security Act (in political cases carried forward from the 1990s), or through regulatory action by BICMA rather than through constitutional adjudication.

Statutory framework

The principal statutes that structure expression in Bhutan are the National Security Act 1992, the Penal Code of Bhutan 2004, the Information, Communications and Media Act of Bhutan 2018 (which replaced the 2006 Act of the same name), and BICMA's Social Media Rules and Regulations 2015. None of these statutes is, in its own terms, a press-freedom law; each defines a regulatory or criminal envelope around expression.

The National Security Act 1992 criminalises treason, sedition and "acts prejudicial to the security and sovereignty of Bhutan". It was the principal charging instrument against Lhotshampa activists in the early 1990s and against defendants in the 2007–2008 Bhutan Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) trials. The Act remains in force. In March 2025 the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention published Opinion 60/2024, adopted in November 2024, finding arbitrary the detention of Birkha Bahadur Chhetri, Kumar Gautam and Sunman Gurung, all convicted under the NSA and serving life sentences.^[3] The Opinion treats the Act's vague wording as one of the reasons the detentions fail the ICCPR standard — a finding Bhutan has not implemented.

The Penal Code of Bhutan 2004 contains the country's defamation provisions. Defamation in Bhutan is a criminal rather than purely civil matter: depending on circumstances it is classified as a petty misdemeanour or a misdemeanour under the Penal Code, with corresponding custodial penalties available in principle, though in practice most disputes result in fines, withdrawals or settlements. The Code also contains provisions on contempt, incitement, and offences against the Tsa-Wa-Sum. Criminal defamation is the statute most frequently invoked in speech disputes involving journalists since the democratic transition in 2008.

The Information, Communications and Media Act 2018 consolidates licensing and content regulation for print, broadcast, online and telecommunications services. It established BICMA in its current form as the converged regulator. BICMA licenses broadcasters, print and online outlets and issues ICT service licences — including licences for over-the-top (OTT) services, currently granted with a five-year validity under guidelines issued in 2022.^[4] BICMA is also the body that handles complaints about published content under the Act's content-standards provisions, and proposed amendments discussed in 2024–2025 would further strengthen the Act around online content including provisions on pornographic and violent material.^[5]

The BICMA Social Media Rules and Regulations 2015 set out categories of prohibited online content: material undermining the sovereignty and security of Bhutan, content against the Tsa-Wa-Sum, defamatory content, obscene content, and content inciting hatred. The rules have been updated periodically. They apply to individual users as well as to licensed operators.

A draft Right to Information Bill has existed in various forms since 2007 to operationalise Article 7(3) of the Constitution. The National Assembly passed an RTI Bill in 2014, but it did not complete its passage through both houses of parliament, and as of 2026 Bhutan does not have an enacted Right to Information Act.^[6] Bhutan is the only country in South Asia that remains unranked in the Global Right to Information Rating, a fact that critics of the legal framework return to regularly.

Institutional history of the Bhutanese press

Kuensel began in 1965 as an internal government bulletin, initially printed by the Mani press in Kalimpong and distributed in government circles. A printing press was imported from India and installed in Thimphu in 1974, enabling domestic production, and the paper was converted from an occasional bulletin into a weekly newspaper by the Department of Information in 1986. A royal kasho in 1992 delinked Kuensel from the government and reconstituted it as Kuensel Corporation Limited; it ceased receiving direct government subsidy in 1998 and launched an online edition in 1999, the same year the internet arrived in Bhutan. Kuensel remained the country's only newspaper until the media liberalisation of 2006.^[19]

Radio in Bhutan began as a volunteer project. On 11 November 1973 a group of young, university-educated Bhutanese working under the National Youth Association of Bhutan (NYAB) borrowed a 400-watt civil wireless transmitter and began half-hour Sunday broadcasts under the name Radio NYAB, initially in English and, from 1974, also in Dzongkha. The government took over the service in 1979, placed it under the Department of Information and Broadcasting, and in 1986 formally renamed it the Bhutan Broadcasting Service, replacing the original transmitter with a 10-kilowatt shortwave unit; a 50-kilowatt shortwave transmitter was added in 1991. A royal kasho in 1992 delinked BBS from the Ministry of Information and granted it operational autonomy, and the BBS Act of 2010 reconstituted it as a public-service broadcaster.^[20]

Television arrived unusually late. Satellite dishes had been banned in 1989 to protect Bhutanese cultural practice, and BBS carried out a pilot television broadcast in 1998 to allow Thimphu residents to watch the FIFA World Cup. Regular BBS television service began on 2 June 1999, timed to the silver jubilee of King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, making Bhutan among the last countries in the world to introduce a domestic television service. BBS now operates two television channels, BBS 1 and BBS 2, alongside radio services in Dzongkha, English, Nepali and Sharchopkha.

Private print media became legally possible only in 2006, with the passage of the first Bhutan Information, Communications and Media Act. Bhutan Times published its inaugural issue on 30 April 2006 as the first privately owned newspaper in the country, followed by Bhutan Observer (English and Dzongkha, also 2006), Business Bhutan, Bhutan Today and, from 2012, The Bhutanese. Community and youth radio arrived in the same cycle: Kuzoo FM, launched on 26 September 2006 as a project of His Majesty's Secretariat and aimed at young listeners, branched into separate English (105 FM) and Dzongkha (104 FM) stations on 21 August 2007 and now covers all twenty dzongkhags, making it the country's second-largest radio network after BBS.

The Bhutanese press environment

Bhutan had no national newspaper before Kuensel was established in 1965 as an official bulletin. Radio broadcasting under the Bhutan Broadcasting Service dates to 1973, and BBS television began in 1999. Private print media was permitted from 2006, and the first wave of independent outlets — Bhutan Times, Bhutan Observer, Business Bhutan, Bhutan Today and later The Bhutanese — launched between 2006 and 2012. The total daily print circulation of the Bhutanese press is small by regional standards and most outlets supplement print with online editions.

Kuensel is published by Kuensel Corporation Limited, a state-owned enterprise in which the government is the shareholder. BBS is directly state-owned and reports to the government. Between them, the two state-owned outlets dominate the domestic media landscape in both reach and resources. Editorial independence is formally asserted by both, and individual journalists at both outlets have written critically of specific government decisions; structurally, however, both operate under state ownership.

The independent outlets occupy a much smaller space. Bhutan Observer, the first private English-language weekly, closed in April 2013, citing financial losses that its editors attributed to a small advertising market and reduced government advertising. Several other private outlets have reduced print frequencies, moved to online-only formats or suspended operations intermittently. The Bhutanese, founded in 2012 and edited by Tenzing Lamsang, has been the most visibly investigative of the private outlets and has continued to publish through periods of significant advertising pressure and defamation-adjacent complaints.

Access for foreign journalists is a separate structural constraint. Bhutan does not grant open press accreditation on arrival; foreign reporters enter under the tourist-visa regime administered by the Department of Tourism, typically travel with a licensed guide, and require prior permission from the Department of Information and Media for substantive reporting. Media-development observers and researchers working on Bhutan have described the resulting pattern consistently: most international reporting filed from inside the country covers Gross National Happiness, environmental policy and cultural preservation, while sustained reporting on the Lhotshampa expulsion, the political-prisoner caseload and press-freedom conditions themselves has generally been done from outside the country or by researchers who combined short in-country visits with diaspora sources.^[21]

Three structural points are consistently made by external monitors and by Bhutanese media researchers. First, the government is the single largest advertiser in the Bhutanese press, and Bhutan Media Foundation and international observers have estimated that government and state-enterprise advertising accounts for a very high share of private media revenue.^[7] Second, licensing authority for print, broadcast and online outlets is concentrated in BICMA. Third, the combination of a small overall ad market and a dominant state advertiser has, in the framing of Reporters Without Borders, International Media Support and the Bhutan Centre for Media and Democracy, produced a press economy in which closures and retrenchment are structural rather than cyclical. The Bhutanese government rejects the strongest versions of this framing and points to the legal guarantees and the continued operation of multiple independent titles.

Documented prosecutions and legal pressure

The historical record of speech prosecutions in Bhutan runs along two tracks. The first is a line of security-law cases carried forward from the early 1990s and the 2007–2008 period, handled under the National Security Act. The second is a much smaller and more recent set of defamation and social-media cases under the Penal Code and the ICM Act.

On the historical track, Tek Nath Rizal was convicted in 1993 under predecessor provisions to the NSA 1992 and sentenced to life imprisonment; he was released by royal amnesty in December 1999. The cohort of Lhotshampa defendants from 1990–94 and the defendants in the 2007–2008 Bhutan Communist Party trials were prosecuted under the NSA. Birkha Bahadur Chhetri, Kumar Gautam and Sunman Gurung — the three men whose detentions the UN WGAD found arbitrary in its March 2025 Opinion 60/2024 — remain in prison as of 2026. The existence of this caseload is a necessary backdrop to any description of the contemporary speech environment, because it is the legal record against which recent prosecutions are read.

On the contemporary track, the most thoroughly documented case is the 2016 defamation suit against the journalist Namgay Zam. Zam, then a television journalist, shared on Facebook an online appeal by Dr Shacha Wangmo concerning a property dispute with Sonam Phuntsho, a businessman and the father-in-law of the then Chief Justice of Bhutan.^[8] Phuntsho filed a defamation suit against Zam and Wangmo. Zam faced a potential three-year sentence under the Penal Code's defamation provisions if convicted. The plaintiff withdrew the case shortly before judgment was announced. The case was covered extensively by The Diplomat, Global Voices, The Bhutanese, Kuensel and IFEX, and is the single most cited domestic speech case in international press-freedom literature on Bhutan.^[9] Zam left Bhutan in early 2017; her departure was described by The Diplomat as an instance of brain drain from the small Bhutanese media sector.^[10]

Beyond the Namgay Zam case, public documentation of individual social-media or defamation prosecutions in Bhutan is thin. Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the US State Department Human Rights Reports and the Social Media Rules analysis by Bhutanese lawyers have all noted that defamation threats and BICMA complaints operate more often as deterrents than as realised prosecutions — the threat of criminal rather than civil defamation, combined with the economic leverage of advertising withdrawal, produces editorial adjustment well before any case reaches a courtroom. This article does not name individuals in social-media prosecution cases beyond Namgay Zam because sources do not meet the threshold of independent corroboration required for Wikipedia-style claims.

Self-censorship

Self-censorship is the most frequently named problem in every independent assessment of Bhutanese media. Reporters Without Borders' 2025 country assessment identifies the "social indicator" — the degree to which journalists avoid covering sensitive topics for fear of appearing to challenge social norms — as Bhutan's lowest-scoring pillar and the principal driver of the country's overall decline.^[11] The Bhutan Media Foundation's periodic media impact studies have recorded self-reported self-censorship among Bhutanese journalists at high levels across multiple editions, although specific percentages vary between studies and survey methodologies. International Media Support and the Bhutan Centre for Media and Democracy have reached similar conclusions in narrative form.

Qualitative evidence comes from published interviews with Bhutanese journalists in Himal Southasian, The Diplomat, Kathmandu Post and the diaspora press, and from domestic academic commentary — notably by Siok Sian Pek-Dorji at the Bhutan Centre for Media and Democracy and by Dorji Wangchuk in Bhutanese academic publications. These sources describe a set of topic clusters that are consistently under-reported by the domestic press: critical coverage of the royal family and royal-linked business interests; detailed case-level reporting on the political-prisoner caseload at Chemgang and Rabuna prisons; the Lhotshampa expulsion framed as state-directed ethnic cleansing rather than "voluntary migration"; corruption cases involving senior officials at the allegation stage rather than post-conviction; land-acquisition disputes around the Gelephu Mindfulness City project; religious-minority issues; and custodial treatment by the Royal Bhutan Police. The absence of domestic reporting on these topics is itself an empirical observation — it is what an archive search of Kuensel, BBS and the private weeklies shows — and it is documented as such in RSF's annual assessments and in Pek-Dorji's work.

Two additional mechanisms appear repeatedly in the domestic literature. The first is normative: Bhutanese writers including Phuntsho Rapten have framed the restraint of critical speech as an expression of tha dam tshig, the Buddhist notion of sacred bond and loyalty, which places public criticism of the monarchy and state institutions within the register of social betrayal rather than within the register of democratic rights.^[22] The second is a professional-formation gap: Bhutan has no dedicated journalism school, and the training offered through the Royal University of Bhutan and by donor-funded short courses is widely described by Bhutanese journalists and the Bhutan Media Foundation as insufficient to sustain an investigative culture, with the result that even journalists inclined to cover sensitive topics often lack the training, institutional support and legal literacy needed to do so safely.

Domestic outlets do not deny that self-censorship exists, but their framing tends to present it as a matter of editorial prudence, cultural respect and responsible reporting rather than as a response to legal or economic pressure. Occasional Kuensel editorials on press freedom treat the question directly and with some candour, while stopping short of the framing used by external monitors.

Tsa-Wa-Sum and royal imagery

The Tsa-Wa-Sum doctrine — King, Country, People as a unified object of loyalty — is the normative frame inside which speech about the monarchy is understood as speech about the state. Bhutan has no dedicated lèse-majesté statute equivalent to Section 112 of the Thai Criminal Code. The relevant legal surface is instead the Tsa-Wa-Sum language in the Penal Code 2004 and in Article 7(22) of the Constitution, under which speech directed at the monarchy can be prosecuted as speech against the state's foundational order.

The comparative framing matters. In Thailand, insults to the monarch are punishable by up to fifteen years of imprisonment per count under a dedicated statute. In the United Kingdom, sedition and seditious libel were abolished by the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, and criticism of the monarchy is legally unrestricted. Japan has had no lèse-majesté law since 1947. Bhutan sits nearer the Thai end of that spectrum in cultural expectation and nearer the British end in statutory text — there is no dedicated offence, but the Tsa-Wa-Sum clauses and the NSA's security provisions cover similar ground.

As an observable fact, Bhutanese government websites under the .gov.bt domain, ministerial social-media accounts on Facebook and X, and the domestic news framing of state events consistently feature royal portraits, congratulatory messages on royal birthdays and anniversaries, and coverage of royal kidu (welfare) distributions, royal development visits and royal foreign travel. This pattern is documentable through any archive search of ministry homepages and domestic news outlets over any recent period. It is best described as a normatively embedded convention of Bhutanese state communications rather than a legal requirement. Academic commentators including Françoise Pommaret and Karma Phuntsho have treated it as an extension of Driglam Namzha — the code of dress, etiquette and deportment — into the sphere of public communications.^[12]

Kuensel and BBS coverage of the royal family is overwhelmingly ceremonial and developmental: state occasions, kidu distributions, foreign visits and royal addresses. Critical commentary on individual members of the royal family is effectively absent from the domestic archive. External monitors describe this as an observed pattern; the Bhutanese response is that the coverage accurately reflects the content of royal activity and that absence of criticism is a matter of social convention rather than state compulsion.

International assessments

Reporters Without Borders. RSF's World Press Freedom Index placed Bhutan at 33rd of 180 countries in 2022 — briefly the highest rank Bhutan had ever achieved and the highest in South Asia that year. The country then dropped to 90th in 2023, 147th in 2024 and 152nd in 2025. Bhutan's 2025 overall score was 32.62, down from 37.29 in 2024, placing it in RSF's "very serious" band (scores under 40). Four of the five sub-indicators fell in the bottom fifth globally — political context (20.63, 161st), economic context (22.34, 170th), legal framework (20.95, 169th) and social context (19.16, 174th) — while the security indicator stood at 80.00 (83rd), reflecting that Bhutanese journalists are not subject to the violence or imprisonment seen in other low-ranked countries. RSF's 2025 assessment singled out the social indicator — self-censorship — as Bhutan's weakest score and attributed the continued decline to journalists avoiding sensitive topics.^[13] Both Kuensel and BBS reported the 2025 ranking domestically and treated it as a serious signal.^[14]

Freedom House. In its Freedom in the World 2025 report, Freedom House upgraded Bhutan from "Partly Free" to "Free" — one of only two countries to be upgraded that year, and the only South Asian country in the "Free" category — citing the consolidation of democratic reform, free and fair legislative elections and improvements in physical security and civil liberties. Bhutan received an aggregate score of 68 out of 100, with 32 out of 40 on political rights and 36 out of 60 on civil liberties.^[15] The civil-liberties component — which includes the freedom-of-expression and belief sub-indicators — remains the weaker half of Bhutan's overall score, consistent with the RSF reading that the expression environment lags behind the formal political one. Bhutan has not historically been included in Freedom House's Freedom on the Net survey.

CIVICUS Monitor. CIVICUS Monitor rates Bhutan's civic space as "obstructed", with a score of 51 out of 100 as of mid-2025. CIVICUS cites media independence, access to information, the chilling effect of defamation laws on journalists and critics, the political-prisoner caseload under the 1992 NSA, the absence of Bhutanese ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the lack of an independent national human rights institution.^[16] CIVICUS was among the signatories on the December 2025 joint statement following the death of Sha Bahadur Gurung, one of the long-held political prisoners.

Committee to Protect Journalists. CPJ does not maintain a large Bhutan caseload; Bhutan appears in CPJ's material sporadically, most prominently around the 2016 Namgay Zam case, and not in CPJ's annual lists of imprisoned journalists in recent years.

US State Department. The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor publishes a Bhutan chapter annually in the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. Section 2a, "Freedom of Expression, Including for Members of the Press and Other Media", consistently describes criminal defamation, the absence of an RTI law, the structural dominance of state-owned media, and the persistence of self-censorship as the principal concerns.^[17] The State Department reports also note the absence of Bhutanese prosecutions for criticism of the government in any given reporting year, which is consistent with the view that self-censorship is more load-bearing than direct prosecution.

The resulting picture is internally contradictory and should be read as such. Bhutan is simultaneously the only country in South Asia rated "Free" by Freedom House and one of the lowest-ranked countries in the world by Reporters Without Borders. The two assessments measure different things — Freedom House aggregates political and civil rights across elections, rule of law and associational freedoms, while the RSF index focuses specifically on the conditions under which journalism is produced — and the divergence is a useful diagnostic rather than a contradiction to be resolved.

Bhutanese media's own discussion of press freedom

A small number of Bhutanese institutions publish regularly on the state of the country's media. The Bhutan Media Foundation, successor body to earlier media-development initiatives and partly donor-funded, publishes periodic media impact studies covering readership, journalist working conditions and self-reported self-censorship. The Bhutan Centre for Media and Democracy (BCMD), founded and long led by Siok Sian Pek-Dorji, publishes policy briefs, training materials and The Druk Journal, a quarterly policy journal whose themed issues on media and governance are among the most substantive domestic critiques of the Bhutanese press environment available. Pek-Dorji's own writing has been influential both inside Bhutan and in regional media-development circles.

The Journalists' Association of Bhutan (JAB) exists as a professional body but has historically been small and intermittently active. JAB statements are rare and, when issued, are usually carried by Kuensel. JAB's published commentary on the ICM Act describes the legal framework as a structural constraint on digital-era journalism — a framing closer to the external-monitor view than to the official government position.^[18]

Kuensel itself has occasionally published editorials on press freedom, particularly around RSF ranking publication dates and after specific incidents. These editorials are diagnostically valuable — they are the record of the Bhutanese press discussing its own environment in the voice of the paper of record — and they tend to fall somewhere between the government and the external-monitor positions.

Exile and diaspora media

A second Bhutanese media ecosystem exists in the diaspora, largely anchored in Nepal, North America and Australia. Bhutan News Service (BNS), Bhutan News Network (BNN), Bhutan Watch, Himalayan Voice and the South Asian diaspora outlet American Kahani cover topics that the domestic press does not run at comparable depth — the political-prisoner caseload, Lhotshampa history and the 2025 Bhutanese-American deportation crisis among them. These outlets are the primary sources cited by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and UN mechanisms when those bodies document Bhutanese human-rights cases, and the record of the last two decades cannot be assembled without them.

The diaspora outlets are advocacy-adjacent — each was founded in the Bhutanese refugee context and most are staffed by former refugees or their descendants — and their individual stories require the same cross-checking any single-source claim requires. The observable feature of the Bhutanese information ecology is that domestic outlets and diaspora outlets rarely cite each other. Stories that circulate extensively in BNS or Bhutan Watch often do not appear in Kuensel or BBS at all; conversely, stories that lead Kuensel on any given day are not typically picked up by the diaspora outlets. The two ecosystems address partly overlapping audiences and largely non-overlapping topic sets.

Contested framings

Three broad framings exist in the sources, and the most honest approach is to present each. The Royal Government of Bhutan and its domestic outlets describe a constitutional framework that guarantees free expression, a press that operates within responsible-reporting norms appropriate to Bhutanese society, and international rankings that reflect methodological mismatches with Bhutanese context. Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, CIVICUS, Amnesty International and the US State Department describe legal guarantees that are not matched by practice, a government that dominates the media economy, self-censorship as a pervasive feature of editorial work, and systematically under-reported topic clusters — the Lhotshampa expulsion, the political-prisoner caseload, critical royal coverage — as evidence of the gap. The academic and policy literature — Michael Hutt, Karma Phuntsho, Françoise Pommaret, Richard Whitecross, Siok Sian Pek-Dorji and Dorji Wangchuk — tends to treat both positions as partly right: the legal framework is genuinely liberal on paper, the structural media economics produce dependency regardless of legal guarantees, and small-society dynamics generate strong social penalties for critical speech independent of formal prosecution.

None of the three positions is wholly wrong. The divergence is largely about whose experience is foregrounded — the editor at Kuensel, the journalist contemplating a story about a judicial relative, the Lhotshampa family whose history does not appear in the national paper of record, or the policy researcher comparing Bhutan's rankings over time.